TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Bryan Ferry, Todd Seavey, GG Allin, and the Sounds

The final rocker to be considered as we close out this “Month of Rock!” is me.

Or rather, I was tickled when humorist and critic Marie Mundaca (at the Get Lit! night of readings that Michele Carlo hosted) recognized me, not from debate-hosting or other places that sprang to my mind but from my performance of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” at a Janice Erlbaum book release party two years ago at Bowery Poetry Club — a book release party that had karaoke and that I recounted in this blog’s first regular entry.

That means we’ve come full circle, faithful readers, and it may be time to alter this blog’s style a bit for the modern era of quick soundbites and tiny Twitter statements — and so I shall, starting the day after tomorrow, tomorrow being the day we do our momentous, epoch-marking Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Is America Economically Doomed?” — surely a fitting time to try something new and perhaps desperate (like attending another Tea Party protest, which I’ll also do tomorrow, at 6:30 in Times Square before heading to Lolita).

Marie Mundaca’s reading at Get Lit!, by the way, was about the time she scraped together just enough money to see berserk punk GG Allin in concert and got to see things like a male-female couple fighting over which of them would perform oral sex on Allin while he was onstage — until Allin decided the matter by kicking the woman in the head.

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Getting back to the far classier Roxy Music for a moment, though: Helen says Bryan Ferry was perhaps the rocker she found most attractive in her youth, so I have an incentive to keep honing my impression of him. And in case you haven’t noticed, the Sounds song “Rock N’ Roll” contains the line “jump up bubble up what’s in store,” so Sounds singer Maja Ivarsson likes the Roxy Music classic “Love Is the Drug.” On the downside, she also sings in the impromptu supergroup seen and heard during the closing credits of Snakes on a Plane, a terrible, terrible film, as I learned when Jerm Pollet and his pals in the Raspberry Brothers hosted a screening of it recently.

Let’s end this “Month of Rock!” on a more positive note, though: I’ll just say that if tomorrow’s “no” econ-debater had his way (judging by his book), Maja and her girlfriend would be able to marry legally in the U.S., and I will at least do her this service: Instead of thinking about Snakes on a Plane, I will link again to her amazing performance of “Seven Days a Week” on Letterman. It’s punk, it’s pop, it’s Dave, it’s a sexy lesbian or bisexual woman, it’s a reminder that periods of market-leaning thinking and New Wave seem to go together in Sweden as in the U.S., and simple though it looks it may be my favorite live performance clip of the decade. And on that surprising note ends the “Month of Rock!”